David John Sheppard

Vertical Land

Known for fusing avant-experiment and filmic atmospheres with a rich melodic and rhythmic sensibility, Sheppard was inspired to write ‘Vertical Land’ by his travels in summer/autumn 2013. Guitars, marimbas, glockenspiels and mountain dulcimers were all attacked with a sense of primal reflex until the compositions were gradually built up, only to be stripped back down again in a very painterly process, to reveal new forms, combinations and colours.

David John Sheppard

Londoner David John Sheppard has rarely strayed from being a creative dispenser of distinction. Sheppard dabbled in music while studying Film & Art History at Art School in Sheffield before getting serious at the dawn of the 1990s with short-lived baroque folk-rockers Balloon, who signed a major label deal with RCA in 1991. From around 1996, he has forged a polymath's career of unbridled yet warmly accessible exploration, initially in the shape of parallel operations with both Keiron Phelan (an old school friend) and Pete Astor (formerly of The Loft and The Weather Prophets).

With Phelan, and drummer Jon Steel, came the pleasurable pastoral post-rock of State River Widening and the still theoretically on-going Phelan-Sheppard. With Astor came trusted sideman duties in the art-pop journeying of Matador recording artists The Wisdom Of Harry and an equal partnership as Ellis Island Sound, who explored their own bedroom electronica, Anglo acid-folk, Afro-Krautrock and pointillist minimalism. Not to mention his semi-solo endeavour with producer/arranger Chris Leary (Ochre), as Snow Palms, which yielded the percussion-led ambient and post-classical essays of 'Intervals'in 2012.